The lick of paint has been applied, the polish has been added to give it a nice sheen, and now finally Skydrive has undergone its name change to OneDrive. And it will stay that way until someone decides that they hold a trademark over the name “One“.

To celebrate the launch, Microsoft have decided to give everyone 20GB free storage for a year, if you follow a special link. And those with Android phones can look forward to automatic photo backups. If you switch that on, you get an extra 3GB. Refer a friend? That’s another 500MB per person. Microsoft are literally throwing space at you.

As well as photo sharing, you can also share and view photos, and another new feature is real-time collaboration with Office Web Apps. OneDrive is cross-platform, and it is baked right into Windows 8.1, Office, and the XBox. So it is easy to use, and easy to access.

Still doesnt fix the basic features needed from desktop for me - I work on various data connections and some are very expensive to use. On Google Drive I can pause syncing so when I am on 3G I dont pay a fortune for data usage but OneDrive doesnt allow that. The other problem is it tells me it is updated...but then starts uploading again.

Unfortunately, the Camera Backup feature doesn't have an option for "only upload when on WiFi and charging", and it creates annoying notifications that can't be turned off, like notifications telling you that it can't upload because you're not connected to WiFi (Yes, I know that. Just upload when I am connected to WiFi).

Google+'s auto backup (while definitely not perfect either) is still a much better alternative. Hopefully Microsoft can improve their offering; I like using a combination of OneDrive and Google Drive. That way I don't have all my eggs in one basket.

Mark O'Neill is a freelance journalist and bibliophile, who has been getting stuff published since 1989. For 6 years, he was the Managing Editor of MakeUseOf. Now he writes, drinks too much tea, arm-wrestles with his dog, and writes some more. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook.